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10 thoughts on “Have the Goons Wrecked the EVE Economy Yet?”

Prices are way up, but not quadrupled. I think the ganking has slowed down, but from now on it will be easy to hit the systems again at will to shock the system. The sandbox is alive, well, and toothy.

The ganking has caused prices to rise. The crippling of the economy isn’t going to happen … the idea was based on the fact that reaction farms for T2 items use Gallente towers which use the ice products the miners are mining… they can force prices higher but that’s it because you can change the reaction farms to using other tower types that use different types of ice. Unless you really spike the price on oxytopes way high (like 20x) and keep it there you can’t have a large impact … the percentage price-wise of any T2 item that is due to oxytopes cost is very low. If industrialists change out the towers then the entire ganking spree is fun but not terribly effective at anything but griefing the tower owners as a secondary target.

I also get the sense this is running into the usual problem of these sort of endeavours – inertia. For all the talk about it, nonstop ganking appears to get fairly boring for the majority.

I think when one has been in EVE for a few years, one just learns to expect everyone Goons and friends go on a hisec campaign. After the third or fourth time, it is difficult to get overly exciting by it.

“Congratulations space friends. Today, in our glorious campaign against the Gallente Ice Miners, we reached a milestone of over 1000 mackinaws killed. Conservative estimates of total damage to mining barges and exhumers is at 280 billion isk.

Conservative estimates of total damage to mining barges and exhumers is at 280 billion isk. This doesn’t include implants, lost productivity, the tripled costs of ice, and the untold billions in isk we’ve scammed from these poor saps. And let’s not forget the rage. You can’t put a price on rage.”

The Goons are a joke -and the industrialists are laughing their arses off.

In the future, The Mittani and the Goons should avoid rather feeble attempts to manipulate markets and focus on what they do best – hiding in null sec, and whining to CCP about the need to nerf high sec.

Oxytope prices barely doubled, and are leveling off – even dropping again in some regions. Demand for oxytopes has dropped by more than 50%, as industrial corps are exchanging Gallente/Serpentis towers for other racial/faction towers, and selling off their oxytope stockpiles at a net profit.

Ice miners have adapted, too, by moving to ice fields in other regions, switching to asteroid mining, or switching from T2 exhumers to cheaper T1 mining barges, with T1 fittings. By switching to the insurable mining barges, the miners are actually winning the economic war, since each kill now costs the ganker more than the victim. The loss in productivity is being offset by the rise in ice prices. And the ship losses to date are offset by ISK which the miners made when the Goons first bought up all of the oxytopes on market.

The smart thing for the Goons to do now would be to sell out their oxytopes, take their profit, and declare victory (which they will do in any case – no matter how badly things turn out), before decreasing demand crashes the price. Over the long haul, a sustained Hulkageddon is a losing proposition, ISK-wise, for the gankers.

Ofc, the Goons could try to expand their efforts to include helium, hydrogen and nitrogen ‘topes, but, most of the industrialists have anticipated this possibility and have already stocked up the other fuels. So, the Goons have already missed this boat.

Except that actually, the Goons know all this. At least, the ones who call the shots certainly do. In all likelihood they bought their isotopes slowly and cheaply over months, and have long since sold them to everyone smart enough to anticipate the price hike but too dumb to see the dice had been rigged ahead of time.

As always, the ones who got hit by this are the stupid, greedy or inattentive, the ones to get rich are the drivers and planners, and for the rest of us it’s mostly business as usual. That is the way of EVE, and what makes it the game we love.